Archive for the ‘open access journals’ Category

“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust announced today that they are to support a new, top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research.”

“The three organizations aim to establish a new journal that will attract and define the very best research publications from across these fields. All research published in the journal will make highly significant contributions that will extend the boundaries of scientific knowledge.”

Faculty scholars and researchers routinely give away the fruits of their labor to for-profit publishers of scholarly communication.

1) Research library budgets cannot sustain ever-increasing subscription costs for scholarly journals; open access journals provide a different model for scholarly communication that empowers the author rather than the publisher.

2) When research is published in open access journals and/or placed in open access institutional repositories, members of the public can access needed research results, which are often funded with tax-payer monies.

3) A growing body of research suggests that open access to research articles and research data spurs on new discoveries and is more cited than research locked behind a pay wall.

Join us in exploring these myriad efforts to liberate scholarly communication during the international celebration of Open Access Week, 2010. Events organized for the week are:

A tenured professor in Educational Technology, Christine Sorensen, has been the Dean of the College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) since 2007, coming to UHM after serving as dean at Northern Illinois University (NIU) from 2001. She has taught in the areas of educational leadership, curriculum, and research and evaluation. She began teaching interactive video and web-based classes more than a decade ago. Her research and publications have focused on distance education, the integration of technology in education, and organizational change, although she also is co-author for one of the leading texts on educational research methods. She is on the editorial board of the Quarterly Review of Distance Education and has been a judge for the national Crystal Awards for best distance education programming. Dr. Sorensen has received over $15 million in grants and has published and presented both nationally and internationally. Prior to joining the NIU faculty in 1996, Dr. Sorensen was a research and evaluation specialist at the Research Institute for Studies in Education at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Her early careers included ten years in radio and television. Dr. Sorensen received her undergraduate degree in communications from the University of Houston and her masters and Ph.D. in higher education from Iowa State University.

OPEN ACCESS IN 2010: MAXIMIZING THE BENEFITS AND SECURING THE FUTURE
Thursday, October 28, 2010
4:00 pm
Sinclair Library, Heritage Reading Room
RSVP required wine and pupus will be served.
*RSVP at http://tinyurl.com/2bveu36 Speaker: Catherine Nancarrow, Consulting Editor, Archives of Internal Medicine, and formerly with Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Catherine Nancarrow has over two decades of editorial experience in biomedical publishing, having served as the Managing Editor of four community-run journals at the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the wjm-western journal of medicine (BMJ Publishing Group) and as a Development/Coordinating Editor for a wide range of health science texts and journals published by such publishers as Little Brown and Lippincott-Williams and Williams. She is currently a Consulting Editor for the Archives of Internal Medicine as well as an Advocacy Consultant with PLoS and other organizations with the aim to educate and inspire the scientific and publishing communities to increase access to the work they generate or publish.

VISIT THE GRADUATE STUDENT OPEN ACCESS INFORMATION TABLE Tuesday, October 26th and Thursday, October, 28th
11:00 AM to 1:00 PM
Campus Center
You can talk to graduate students about Open Access issues, receive free information, and get an Open Access pen!

For more information please call, Beth Tillinghast (956-6130) or email her at betht@hawaii.edu

Open Access and Changes in Scholarly Communication

Art Auditorium

2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

24 February 2010

As a point of departure, Lynch will examine a survey of changes in scholarly practice driven by information technology in the broad sense (these developments are sometimes called “e-research” or “e-scholarship”; the supporting technology base is often termed “cyber infrastructure”). Lynch will move from these developments to related changes in the system of scholarly communication, and discuss some of the policy and technical issues involved in moving towards open access to traditional publications and also to the underlying data that supports these publications.

Clifford Lynch has been the Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) in Washington, DC since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information.

For more information about the lectures, please contact Teri Skillman at 956-8688 or by email at skillman@hawaii.edu.

Faculty scholars and researchers routinely give away the fruits of their labors to for-profit publishers of scholarly communication. To maintain the integrity of our peer-review process, faculty also function as unpaid reviewers for these same publications. Finally, faculty frequently serve as unpaid or poorly paid editors for these journals. Yet after faculty have freely and willingly contributed content and labor to the publishers of our scholarly journals, the resulting publications are sold to our Libraries, at an enormous expense, generating significant profits for the publishers and creating an ever-expanding budgetary black hole for the Library!

If this situation fails to arouse an appropriate sense of injustice, perhaps consider that the general public –- which has already paid for all of this research through their tax dollars –- often cannot access this literature without paying a per-article cost to the publishers!

But change is at hand. There are concerted efforts on multiple fronts to restore some sense to the scholarly communication process. A growing number of university libraries have established institutional repositories to provide general access to the work of their scholars and researchers. Authors are amending their copyright agreements to ensure that their work can be freely accessed via their institutional repositories. The National Institutes of Health are requiring research that they fund be made accessible — at no additional cost — to the public that paid for the research. An increasing number of scholars and researchers are taking scholarly communication into their own hands by introducing Open Access (OA) journals as an alternative to journals produced by for-profit publishers.

Join us in exploring these myriad efforts to liberate scholarly communication during the international celebration of Open Access Week, October 19 – 23, 2009. Events organized for the week are:

She will be speaking at an afternoon session on Friday, May 15th in Hamilton Library about open access journal article publishing and its short and long term benefits to faculty/academicians, universities, and libraries. New models of research publication can serve to increase the creative use of knowledge and information, and help us take a giant step forward in advancing science (basic and applied) at a time when doing so has a fresh focus in the US.

Working closely with her editorial boards, Ms. Nancarrow brings a tremendous amount of insight into the researcher/publisher relationship and will be able to address many of the questions researchers may bring to this session regarding open access publishing and the Public Library of Science publications.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 by Harold E. Varmus, Patrick O. Brown, and Michael B. Eisen. PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource. The PLoS journals include: PLoS ONE, PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens, and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Though PLoS is focused on science, any researcher will find this discussion about open access publishing enlightening.

Publishing and the Dissemination of Scholarship: Is the Process Broken?

The growth of knowledge depends on timely, widespread dissemination of scholarship. For the last 300 to 400 years, the results of scholarly efforts have been shared through journals and monographs. That system may have outlived its usefulness. Worse yet, the current system of dissemination of scholarship may actually be creating barriers to research. As the numbers of journals and scholarly books have grown, it has become increasingly incumbent on academic libraries to be the primary sources for, and thus the main purchasers of these scholarly products. The web now offers alternative channels for publishing research results and analyses. More important, the web has the capability to allow more timely, more widespread, more accessible, and less expensive dissemination of scholarship. These changes will not, can not be imposed from the top; they are being brought about by the actions of individual faculty members, making themselves aware of trends in scholarly communication and incorporating those changes in their publication habits.

Please join us for a discussion about new strategies in scholarly communication that will greatly increase public access to research, and sharing and collaboration among knowledge workers.

The American Institute of Physics is pleased to announce its newest journal: the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (JRSE). To complement this online-only journal, AIP has developed a website with components that go beyond the standard journal webpage.

The Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) has started a new international, open access, electronic only journal called The Plant Genome. This journal will be published three times a year and will publish original research investigating all aspects of plant genomics. In order to support this open access journal, CSSA is using the model where authors are charged for publication. The first issue is available and the table of contents contains several sections: Research Highlights, Review & Interpretation, and Original Research. Interestingly, the editorial, Welcome to The Plant Genome, discusses the idea of using wikis, discussion boards, and blogs to develop resources and facilitate discussion. The combination of an open access journal and these other communication vehicles has a lot of potential for collaboration and generation of new ideas.